Visio-Temporal Attention for Multi-Camera Multi-Target Association

Yu-Jhe Li, Xinshuo Weng, Yan Xu, Kris M. Kitani; Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF International Conference on Computer Vision (ICCV), 2021, pp. 9834-9844

We address the task of Re-Identification (Re-ID) in multi-target multi-camera (MTMC) tracking where we track multiple pedestrians using multiple overlapping uncalibrated (unknown pose) cameras. Since the videos are temporally synchronized and spatially overlapping, we can see a person from multiple views and associate their trajectory across cameras. In order to find the correct association between pedestrians visible from multiple views during the same time window, we extract a visual feature from a tracklet (sequence of pedestrian images) that encodes its similarity and dissimilarity to all other candidate tracklets. We propose a inter-tracklet (person to person) attention mechanism that learns a representation for a target tracklet while taking into account other tracklets across multiple views. Furthermore, to encode the gait and motion of a person, we introduce second intra-tracklet (person-specific) attention module with position embeddings. This second module employs a transformer encoder to learn a feature from a sequence of features over one tracklet. Experimental results on WILDTRACK and our new dataset `ConstructSite' confirm the superiority of our model over state-of-the-art ReID methods (5% and 10% performance gain respectively) in the context of uncalibrated MTMC tracking. While our model is designed for overlapping cameras, we also obtain state-of-the-art results on two other benchmark datasets (MARS and DukeMTMC) with non-overlapping cameras.